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Helping Hands

Guruwari, right, a 6-year-old girl, waits for a relief van with her family as her house is flooded out in a village near Cuttack, India, Saturday, July 21, 2001.

Community in Minnesota raises $275,000 for earthquake relief

By Associated Press

When an earthquake ravaged Gujarat, India, in January, killing 15,537 people, it was a wake-up call for many in the Indian American community in Minnesota.

For Arati Damania, seeing the ruins on TV struck a chord. She grew up in a Gujarati city where many of her immediate family live. None was seriously hurt.

“I felt a huge amount of pain that made me say, ‘Let’s do something. We owe something back to our motherland,’” she said. “I belong to both of these communities [Minnesota and India] and I wanted to be a bridge.”

So far the Indian American community in Minnesota has raised $275,000 to rebuild the village of Vijaypar, India that was devastated by the earthquake. The quake, which measured 7.9 on the Richter scale, was the country’s worst in 50 years. Of the 214 homes in Vijaypar, 211 were reduced to rubble. The village’s 800 people are still living in tents.

“You feel like you get a calling in life, and we felt like this was our calling,” Damania said of herself and her husband, Bhavesh, who is the chairman of the India Earthquake Relief Fund.

The relief fund is a joint venture between the India Association of Minnesota and the Gujarati Samaj Cultural Association of Minnesota.

The money raised by the Minnesota community will be used by a nonprofit organization to rebuild more than 200 homes. It also will go towards a community center, a primary school, a water-harvesting system and other projects.

Vipin Gopal, president of the India Association of Minnesota, said it’s the largest fund-raising effort ever by the Minnesota Indian community. “It shows that we are graduating from being a global economy to being a global community,” he said.